Dave Shelton
About Author
Dave Shelton was born and raised in Leicester. He studied illustration at Cambridge and, later, at Brighton, where he attained his MA in Sequential Illustration. He worked for some years as a jobbing illustrator before creating the comic strip Good Dog, Bad Dog, a slapstick comedy canine noir detective series, published in The DFC, The Guardian and The Phoenix story comic. The first book collection of Good Dog, Bad Dog, published by David Fickling Books, was the winner of the inaugural Leeds Graphic Novel Award in 2010. He now lives in Cambridge.
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Interview
THIRTEEN CHAIRS
PUBLISHED BY DAVID FICKLING BOOKS
OCTOBER 2014
Just in time for Halloween comes THIRTEEN CHAIRS, an atmospheric collection of eerie ghost stories by Dave Shelton, award-winning author of A Boy and a Bear in a Boat.
Thirteen Chairs marks a decided shift away from his earlier debut novel in both subject matter and style. The book opens with a boy, Jack, his hand on the handle of a door, wondering whether to turn it and if he does, what he'll find in the room that lies on the other side?
When Jack enters the room, he finds 12 shadowy characters sat around a table, waiting for him to join them in a ghostly story-telling session. Each of these characters tells a story, one after the other, but when will Jack's turn come and what will his story be? A great collection to share with students aged 12+ in the run-up to Halloween.
Author Dave Shelton talked to ReadingZone about how he came to write a collection of ghost stories.
Q: Why did you decide to write a novel that was so different from A Boy and a Bear in a Boat?
A: It was a deliberate move in this instance to do something very different. Readers had been contacting me, asking if I was going to do something else with the Bear and Boy characters but for me, A Boy and a Bear in a Boat was a complete work in itself. I thought I'd never write a sequel and my intention at that time was that it wasn't going to happen, so the next book along had to be very different. I didn't want to be typecast as someone who wrote just these kinds of books.
Q: What made ghost stories something you wanted to pursue?
A: By the time I got to the end of writing Thirteen Chairs, I was asked why I had decided to write ghost stories and I couldn't remember the reason, so it wasn't because of some deep rooted desire to write ghost stories but more that I was looking for what to do next.
I had been listening to Alex Jennings on the radio reading a ghost story, O Whistle and I'll Come to You by MR James. He read it very well but even when I hear stories I really enjoy, my brain goes off on tangents and I start to think, I'd have done this or this. So it got me thinking about writing my own ghost stories.
I had had (but then abandoned) an idea to make it a book of modern ways for ghosts to haunt (via computers, sat navs, mobile phones, etc.) But eventually I decided to do a collection of my own ghost stories, some with a quite old fashioned feel, that would have a coherent thread running through it. I had this idea of a ring of people telling their stories and that one of them would be the central character, which is what happens in Thirteen Chairs.
Q: How does the process of writing short stories differ from writing one longer novel?
A: I thought that writing a lot of short stories would be easier than writing A Boy and a Bear in a Boat, but that has only two characters - a boy, and a bear - so it was relatively easy to get the characters sorted out. Writing Thirteen Chairs was a very long process. It just didn't occur to me that having 13 characters and individual stories would turn into a kind of juggling act to keep on top of them all, so there was a lot of writing and re-writing.
Also, I was playing around with different forms that a short story can take. I admire that kind of disciplined writing, where you lay it down and keep an economy of language without making it dull and lifeless.
With some of the stories I had a strong idea of what the narrative was and the plot mechanisms. The Patchwork Sailor, for example, was a strong idea and one I needed to not mess up so I did a lot of rewrites, whereas others were more about the character or the voice, like the Girl in the Red Coat and The Red Tree.
Q: What is it like telling the story through different narrators?
A: In the best instances, having narrators is like ventriloquism where the characters are actually telling the stories. If they are strong enough they really lend their voice to the story, and some are weak and some are stronger. I was giving myself a technical challenge by using them, just as I did with writing that many stories and characters in the first place.
Q: Do you have a favourite among the stories in the book?
A: Looking at the collection, I do like Patchwork Sailor. It's got a nautical theme so I managed to smuggle Bear and a Boat into the story (I'm waiting to hear who spots it), and I liked the shape of the story I had come up with; I liked what it was trying to conceal. What I was attempting was a reasonably complex story with a strong idea and narrative - and it was proper scary!
The story I enjoyed writing the most was The Girl in the Red Coat, because I enjoyed writing in the voice of Amelia, the young girl who tells that one, so much.
Q: Do you like ghost stories to be more suggestive than explicit?
A: The stories in Thirteen Chairs are scary, but they are not about gore and horror. I like horror that is more suggestive -- films like the 1960's version of The Haunting where there are a few spooky noises but you never see anything terrible and yet it's still properly scary.
When I was younger I watched a certain amount of not very good horror and eventually I also became a fan of the old black and white Universal Horror films, but I'm not a huge fan of the genre although I like it when it's done well. I'm not a voracious consumer of ghost or horror; if something is meant to be good I will look at it but it needs to be the stuff that's playing with ideas, suspense etc. The BBC version of Whistle and I'll Come Back to You builds up a sense of foreboding and dread although you never really see anything.
In Thirteen Chairs, I wanted the stories to be scary but through suggestion, that was the tone I was trying to achieve, and I found my own instinctive way to build that in these stories. There is a lot more horror and dark material in some other children's material.
Q: Why did you decide to illustrate the stories?
A: If all the books I write are going to be illustrated, I would want to be the illustrator. I did consider not having illustrations in Thirteen Chairs because these are ghosts stories and I wanted the reader to evoke their own images and not to impose my idea of what characters would look like.
However, when I decided to go ahead, I made a deliberate decision to really cut back on what is shown. So you don't see the protagonist of the story in the illustrations because I didn't want to impose on the reader what the characters looked like and especially not the characters who tell the stories.
Q: What are you planning to write next?
The next book I write will be for a younger age group, so more like A Boy and a Bear in a Boat readership. It's a similar style of story that is for readers aged seven years plus as against 13 plus for Thirteen Chairs, but I hope much older people will read it, too. I've planned it as a funny murder mystery story, although it'll probably be very different by the time I've written it!
Q: Are you still involved in writing comic books?
A: I'm doing the occasional short comic strips for The Phoenix Comic but I don't yet know if I'll do more. There may be a second book of Good Dog, Bad Dog; there was always intended to be another and I hope it will see the light of day. I'm certainly hoping to find time to draw occasional short strips, but I may not do another book length comic strip. I hope I will but it's so much work and I'm very slow at virtually everything except eating, and comics are hugely labour-intensive.
It's become a more accepted format than it was ten or 20 years ago but it still doesn't get reviews in the press and it sells very modestly, so the comic work is more of an indulgence than writing novels, which tend to sell better.
Q: Where do you do your writing?
A: It varies but I write mostly on my laptop. I toyed with the idea of writing by hand but if I lose the book then it's gone and I'm very forgetful and absent minded, so I type straight into my laptop and back it up!
The studio is at the front of our house and my partner, Pam Smy, is an illustrator, so I may write there or in one of the other rooms in our house or elsewhere entirely, like the library. I can write anywhere but I do need it to be quiet.
Q: What do you do to escape?
A: Apart from the domestic things that need doing, I like going swimming with my step daughter and playing rounders through the summer; when I worked in a bookshop they had a rounders team and we've just kept going for over 20 years now. I like going to the cinema and reading and reading comics, and doodling for no particular purpose at all....
A BOY AND A BEAR IN A BOAT
DAVID FICKLING BOOKS
JULY 2013 (PAPERBACK)
Dave Shelton and his editor David Fickling have won the 2013 Branford Boase Award, recognising an outstanding debut novel for children, for A Boy and a Bear in a Boat published by David Fickling Books. The novel has previously been shortlisted for the CILIP Carnegie Medal and the Costa Children's Book Award.
A Boy and a Bear in a Boat is the story of a boy and a bear who go to sea together, equipped with a suitcase, a comic book and a ukulele. Their journey doesn't quite go to plan; surprises include storms, sponges, and a starring role for a disgusting (possibly radioactive) sandwich.
Shelton, whose career in children's books started in illustration, had contemplated creating the novel as a comic strip for newspapers; he had already written and illustrated the successful comic strip Good Dog Bad Dog for the DFC comic.
However, he decided that the format of an illustrated novel would better suit his idea for this novel, which began with two characters (a boy and a bear) who are stranded on a boat together. Shelton says, "I liked the idea of their isolation and that they would get on each other's nerves and I thought I could explore their characters that way."
Focusing on a novel rather than a comic also came down to a practical decision; he was due to meet his editor, David Fickling of David Fickling Books, who wanted an idea for a novel. "It was a slight idea, and I didn't even know if I could write a novel, but David reacted very positively even though I only had a few doodled drawings and half an A4 sheet with a brief synopsis to show him! It wasn't really much to go on....", Shelton says.
The transition for the illustrator to 'working in prose' was a difficult one, he admits. "After I signed the contract, I admitted that I wasn't sure I could actually write it but David had tremendous faith in it from the word go, so it's nice the Branford Boase award also recognises the editor's role. He was tremendously helpful and quietly brilliant."
One of Fickling's suggestions was to change Shelton's title from 'Here is Where We Are' (which turned out to be impossible to remember) to the far catchier 'A Boy and a Bear in a Boat'. Shelton says, "I had worked in a bookshop for years and remembered how people would come in and say they had heard about a book and what it was about, but they often couldn't remember the title. I thought if this title at least had a boy and a bear to start with, there'd be more hope someone would remember the book! So eventually I had to agree with David."
Shelton had also wanted to create a novel "with no beginning and no ending - so just the middle bit", but again on Fickling's advice, he did create something of a beginning - the boy waking up to find he was in a boat, with a bear. "It means that the reader meets the bear at the same time as the boy," says Shelton.
The story follows the boy and the bear, in the boat, trying to navigate to somewhere although you are never sure where that is. Shelton, too, never knew, nor cared, what their physical journey would be; "The real story is about the characters and their relationship. Largely it was a matter of taking two characters, confining them in a confined situation, and playing around with them."
A metaphorical reading of the novel would also be appropriate, says Shelton. "The irony of writing about characters who are floundering about in the sea, not knowing where they were headed, was deeply resonant for me...."
The story presented several challenges to the author. While keeping the number of characters to two helped simplify it, the very bland landscape of the sea and the sky also meant he had to engineer events to move the story on. "I started out by trying to make the two of them being bored and there was much more of that in my initial draft. Eventually, though, I succumbed to the inevitable of having to bring more in to the story; just having two characters together getting bored wasn't enough. I even fell asleep when I was trying to edit it!" There is one memorable and funny scene where the boy and the bear play 'I spy', with the inevitable spotting of the sea, and the sky, and the boy's increasing frustration as the bear fails to get even these right.
One thing Shelton did know, almost from the start, was where the story was headed and how it would end. Most of the novel is about the two characters getting to know each other and to understand each other, despite their considerable differences. "From quite early on I knew where their relationship was going," says Shelton. "I had the ending written out very early and I am very proud of it, and it certainly helped having a literary destination for the characters."
Shelton has also illustrated the novel, beautifully, with black and white line drawings. He had only given himself about two weeks to complete the 90 or so illustrations, but took much longer to complete them and to roughly lay out the pages to fit the illustrations.
"Because I had started writing the novel with such a slight idea, I thought I was going to write a slight novel," says Shelton. "It was going to be a small chapter book that I could learn from but it just grew and grew and took much longer than I had expected. I spent a ludicrous amount of time on it - so it is just as well it has been as successful as it has!"
